


Breakdown of a Host-Parasite Relationship

by greywing (ctrlx)



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: F/F, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-23
Updated: 2013-06-23
Packaged: 2017-12-15 22:42:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/854813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ctrlx/pseuds/greywing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>With one puzzle cracked, Delphine and Cosima turn to consider the other riddles in the room: each other. </p><p>(SPOILERS: Takes place directly after the events of the season finale.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Breakdown of a Host-Parasite Relationship

  
**Breakdown of a Host-Parasite Relationship**   
_a case study of (dis)trust as a learned behavior_   


  


Cosima initiated the kiss. After she and Delphine disengaged from their embrace. After Delphine had loosened her hold when she’d felt Cosima pulling away. After she’d clutched Cosima close. After Cosima had told her she was sick.

They’d separated and Delphine had felt Cosima’s hands slide across her back and come to rest on her shoulders. She’d turned her head to look at Cosima, anxious to see her expression. First the dreads entered her field of vision, next the plastic frames, an angle briefly throwing a glare off the lenses, behind which were eyes pinched and luminous above--

Lips crashed into Delphine’s.

Delphine gasped or tried to draw a breath and past her parted lips darted Cosima’s tongue, unexpected and determined, with none of the delicacy Delphine remembered.

Delphine reeled.

The cushions dipped as Cosima shifted to turn more fully toward her. A knee bumped into Delphine’s thigh, followed by Cosima’s weight pushing into her. Her stomach dropped. There was nothing at Delphine’s back to catch her. She was falling.

Delphine floundered blindly for an anchor. She managed to grasp Cosima’s triceps, only to lose her hold as Cosima slipped her hands down along her arms, drawing away handholds and arresting Delphine’s instinctive reach for the brunette’s face, her neck, her hair--the places she wanted to be touching Cosima, the places that drew Delphine like gravity. But Cosima’s clever fingers found and interlaced with Delphine’s. They tugged, urging, and guided their joined hands to lie high atop Cosima's thighs, where Cosima splayed Delphine's fingers wide and dragged her, flat-palmed, over taut flesh.

Cosima’s lips slackened and a sound between a gasp and a moan tumbled into Delphine’s mouth.

Delphine’s pulse leapt into a gallop. Her gut clenched.

Their hands hit Cosima’s knees and the push became a pull that inched up the hem of that short blue dress and trailed Delphine’s touch chasing after. Delphine was aware of their trek, but dimly, her focus consumed by the attention of Cosima’s mouth on hers, now brutal, now soothing, coaxing and driving, relentless.

And tasting faintly of coffee.

A haze descended across Delphine’s thoughts and through the fog of sensory overload the immunologist imagined that she heard faint echoes of instruction and advice, clinical and critical, from her crash course on monitoring a subject: _For the most part, the subject should lead in your interactions. Endeavor to build rapport and foster trust. Let her make her own decisions. Engage with discretion. Exercise sound judgement._

There was no discretion or judgement in following where Cosima led as she swept Delphine’s hands across her hips and around the curve of her ass where she pressed Delphine’s hands into her until Delphine flexed and clenched. Cosima arched up in her grip, hissing air in through her teeth, and leaned her forehead against Delphine’s.

“Yes.”

Cosima uttered the word in a faint whisper, breath hot on Delphine’s skin, eyes fluttering behind closed lids. And seeing that she was unobserved, as so many times before she’d been unobserved, Delphine gazed upon Cosima’s face. Flushed with warmth. Eyebrows furrowed. Lips parted, swollen and bruised.

Delphine trembled.

_Don't look._

Delphine closed her eyes and sought out Cosima with her lips.

Into her welcome mouth Cosima sounded a hum low in her throat that reverberated through Delphine. Their hands resumed their journey, up over the small of Cosima’s back, into the dip of her waist, and coasting along the cascade of the brunette’s ribs. The dress bunched and pooled atop their wrists as their progress hitched it higher and higher. And still there was clothing between them, clinging spandex and nylon and cotton under Delphine’s palms that suggested warmth and sinews beneath, barriers between them that buffeted the French woman between tides of relief and frustration.

It was scary and exciting and just as Delphine had felt several days before when she’d lunged at Cosima, unsure how fast or how far things would progress or how far she wanted them to progress and everything between her and Cosima accelerating on a warped trajectory at a rate that left her blind and breathless.

_Don’t think._

No wondering what this meant or if it meant anything or where it was going as they hit the underswell of Cosima's breasts and Cosima guided her along their generous curves, slow and ponderous, so that Delphine almost believed she could map out every seam of the bra underneath.

No worrying if this was the time or the place or if that man or maybe even _Sarah_ \--who would kick her willowy arse--might materialize at the door--the “door” that they hadn’t “locked”--as Cosima conveyed Delphine brushing over her full roundness, skimming over nipples pert and hard even through layers of clothing.

No analyzing what she felt or what Cosima might feel or what she hoped Cosima felt or what she wanted to feel as she caressed Cosima through her clothing, tentatively at first, then more daringly, firmly, roughly, kneading, searching, _pinching_.

At that Cosima broke away from their kiss and pitched forward, head turning aside and face burying into the crook of Delphine’s neck. She leaned into Delphine’s touch, growled. The guttural sound sent an electric spasm through Delphine that tightened her hold. Cosima whimpered.

The hands that had held Delphine hostage fell away and dropped to her waist. Fingers plucked and scrabbled at the top of Delphine’s jeans, snagged on belt loops, gave up, and reversed direction. Palms, hot and unexpected and piercingly cool where metal kissed, flattened skin-to-skin atop Delphine’s abdomen.

Delphine drank in a lungful of air.

At her throat Cosima nipped and licked and Delphine threw her head back to allow her greater access. Her own hands slid down to Cosima's hips to hold the brunette in place, haul her closer, goad the assault, cling to keep from drowning. On her body Cosima's hands moved with restless abandon, seemingly everywhere at once, gripping a thigh, tangling in Delphine’s hair, teasing at the gap between flesh and denim at the small of Delphine’s back. But they were nothing to Cosima’s mouth exuding pure heat anywhere it fell upon Delphine’s flesh, an orchestration of tongue and teeth and lips that scraped and laved and brought the blood rushing to the surface of Delphine’s skin.

This was different than the first time, when Cosima had moved eagerly but slowly, sweet and attentive, accommodatingly patient. This was--

Cosima placed her mouth upon the pulse hammering in Delphine's throat and sucked. Hard.

Delphine keened.

Cosima went still all over.

And pulled away.

Her hands whisked out from beneath Delphine's shirt and tugged hems--that little blue dress dragged up to her armpits--into place at an agitated frenzy. Before Delphine's dazed eyes the brunette shifted on the couch into a proper sitting position, and then seemed to fold in on herself, propping her elbows on her knees and her forehead against the heels of her palms.

“I’m sorry,” Cosima croaked hoarsely.

 _What?_ Delphine almost gasped but didn't. She lay slouched and abandoned, disheveled and in disarray, hands still poised to brace the body no longer bearing down on her. Gripped by disbelief her mental faculties sluggishly attempted to shift. Her fingers moved with the same reluctance, curling around empty air, as her arms dropped awkwardly into her lap.

She had no idea what had just happened.

Only that she was flushed with a heat beneath her skin like an itch and the bruising tenderness of Cosima’s visitation upon her lips and that her meager recourse would have to consist of a paltry moment for her mind to catch up to her body and her body to find breath and for her breath to stop rattling in her throat, which would have surely made her voice shake.

Hours earlier she'd arrived calm and confident, steadfastly determined and girded to be patient. During the flight over she'd even drafted a vague plan--involving earnestness, advice, aid, cooperation--and made hopeful projections of positive turnouts, every consideration calculated to take things slow.

All that seemed just a bit trite now with her heartbeat deafening in her ears and tremors running through her hands.

_Merde._

She wanted a cigarette.

With a quiet sigh Delphine passed her hands over her face. A stolen glance told her that Cosima had neither noticed nor moved. She’d sagged into a heap of bowed slopes, closed off and self-contained. Delphine frowned and set about sitting up and gathering herself. Under a pretense of absentmindedness, she yanked at the back of her jeans and resettled her top by fluffing it out, all the while surreptitiously surveying Cosima.

She didn’t see any tears.

Delphine had no idea if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

Hesitantly, unsure of her voice and the thick cocoon of silence Cosima had wrapped around herself, Delphine asked, “Are you okay?”

Too late she realized it was a ridiculous question. Tension stiffened Cosima’s neck and shoulders. It was the same buzzing stillness that had overtaken Cosima earlier, where rebuff and violence lurked beneath the surface. Delphine’s hand twitched but she kept it close.

Cosima huffed, once, darkly. “What’s there not to be okay about?”

Delphine held herself carefully still. The snappish sarcasm she understood but the underlying thread of venomous anger she heard frightened her. As it had the other day when Cosima had flung rage at her like a weapon, raised it between them like a wall. Not just because the words had hurt--and had been crafted to hurt--but because the anger had felt _wrong_ coming from this woman who, as Delphine had discovered in helpless delight, sought joy in finding wonder in the world.

But the pursuit of truth hadn’t uncovered wonder, only this place, the two of them alone, betrayal pressing at their backs, uncertainty leading at the fore.

Delphine had seen it coming. Her part, at least. More and more Delphine hadn’t wanted to hurt Cosima, but more and more she’d known she would.

Delphine worried at her bottom lip and stared at Cosima’s hunched form. She looked small and alone. Delphine wanted to reach for her; Delphine wanted to flee.

She wanted to kiss her again. And not think.

“I’m sorry,” she said softly.

Cosima turned her head to peek at Delphine out of the corner of her eye. “You say that a lot.”

Delphine inhaled sharply though there had been no force behind Cosima’s words. The words had the flatness of a student reciting a law of nature.

A reflexive apology leapt to her lips. Delphine swallowed it.

"I meant I was worried if maybe you were feeling--” Cosima’s jaw clamped tight. “--uncomfortable--” The brunette’s lips thinned as behind them teeth ground one against another. “--or--” Cosima’s gaze narrowed. “--maybe it was--it’s me?”

Delphine threw it out there, vague and ambiguous, before she could dwell too long on diffuse fears, on the thought that had settled as tremors in her muscles the moment Cosima had kissed her, on the seemingly hundreds of questions unspoken and unspeakable between them.

Cosima’s confusion was immediate. “What?”

Delphine flushed and adjusted her seat, looking anywhere--at their laptops side-by-side on the coffee table, an innocuous red shoe in a corner, what looked like a shrine to a dead woman shoved up against the wall, down at her limp hands curled atop her lap--but at Cosima. “Before, you said--and just now--”

“Oh,” Cosima said, catching on with the speed and depth of perception that so quickly drew connection to connection. “ _Oh._ ” Then, more quietly, “Oh.”

Silence rang in Delphine’s ears, long and unbroken, until at last she raised her head.

A gasp stuck in her throat.

Cosima sat up unbent, looking at her. Examining. Studying. _Scrutinizing._ Her keen eyes swept over the planes of Delphine's face, touched fleetingly on her lips, and caught the bob in Delphine’s throat as she swallowed. Distant, penetrating, her gaze cut through Delphine.

There was no recognition in those dark-limned eyes for the French scientist who had posed as a foreign student. None of the predicted surprise or intrigue afforded her by an obliging mark. No tenderness and concerned attention of a new lover.

Delphine beheld a scientist observing a subject.

Yet it was Cosima who turned away.

Delphine exhaled.

Words crowded in Delphine's mind, all ready to protest and defend and explain and maybe, just maybe, make sense of the scattered and shattered components that comprised the two of them arrived here, at this juncture, from disparate paths.

But every syllable was worthless.

Her own fault for having told so many lies and half-lies and masked truths.

Into the silence that followed, without turning to face Delphine, Cosima said, "I didn't mean it. Well, no. I guess I sorta--did. But I was being . . . stupid.” Delphine struggled to discern the meaning in her words, but Cosima only added in a whisper, “So stupid.”

Delphine bit her lip to still its sudden quiver. She stared ahead into the space in front of her and registered none of it. “Did it really show?”

Her voice sounded alien in her own ears--small, timid, shrinking--and for a moment Delphine wasn’t sure she’d asked the question.

Cosima waited a long time before answering.

“You couldn’t even laugh,” the brunette said softly, reflective, with a detached quality that Delphine often heard in the voices of intellectuals trying to present ideas coherently even as they groped to formulate the picture inside their minds. But beneath that Delphine thought she could hear something sad too and it drew her head around to risk a glance. Cosima paid her no attention; she was fixated on a spot across the room.

“I mean, at first you came at me and it was like _whoa_.” Cosima flinched back, torso sinking into the couch cushions, while her hands flew up to ward off something unseen, fingers spread and palms thrust outward. “But then.” The brunette’s arms flopped bonelessly across her middle as she leaned back and hung her head over the edge of the couch, eyes slipping shut. “You looked so lost.”

The corners of Cosima’s lips twitched. A smile. There and gone.

“You weren’t sure where to put your hands and every time you tried to smile it was like your face forgot how.”

Yes, because she’d begun to shake down to her very marrow.

“I kept expecting you to walk away and out the door.”

The thought had occurred to Delphine. At more than one point.

“But you put your hands in mine and followed me.”

To the bed, yes, the point of no return. In so many ways.

“And then you got . . . shy. You tried not to act like it, but you were so quiet. Like, you barely made a sound, like someone could be listening.”

She’d gone to Cosima prepared to pretend. She hadn’t been prepared to pretend the other way--to restrain her body’s visceral reaction. She’d done so out of self-defense, as an act of self-preservation.

“And after . . .” Cosima opened her eyes and surveyed the ceiling. “After, you looked so, so--so _surprised_.”

Delphine resisted the urge to cover her eyes and hide, which had been the precise reaction that had overcome her in Cosima’s bed when she’d plummeted from the height of release into a fog of conflict and confusion

“It showed,” Cosima concluded inexorably, in tones of sorrow and resentment that suffocated. “But it was kinda--even when you--you cried--it was, I don’t know--” She wrung her head from side-to-side atop the fur throw, searching, hands revolving in the air. “Real.”

Delphine placed a hand over her mouth and blinked, hard and fast. Cosima rolled her head toward her and regarded her sideways. “But maybe I just wanted to believe it was real.”

Their eyes met and held.

“Totally stupid, right?” Cosima asked quietly.

“No,” Delphine managed, dropping her hand away from her mouth and draping it across her waist. She sucked in her lips, shook her head. “Not you. You are not stupid. Cheeky, but not stupid.”

Cosima’s features settled first into that hard, distancing mask she'd worn when she'd laid out the truth of Delphine's identity, but what followed was the slow breaking of that disarming smile, toothy and a shade sardonic.

"I'm not sure I'd consider you a reliable authority to make that sort of assessment," Cosima challenged.

Delphine nodded gamely, eyebrows arching, allowing the gentle note of teasing in Cosima's tone to ease the knot in her stomach, the tightness in her chest and behind her eyes. "It may be true that I need more time to become more familiar with the source material."

She refrained from adding _If the source material will allow it._

Cosima smirked but said no more. She simply considered Delphine with measured regard. A tinge of wistfulness lingered at the corners of her eyes that softened her gaze. It made the space between them feel, for the first time that night, still and unobstructed.

It was almost comfortable.

In the silence Cosima reached out and ghosted her fingertips across the back of Delphine’s left hand. The French woman watched the slow traversal and kept still as Cosima’s fingers hooked beneath her hand and claimed possession of it, transferring it from the blonde’s lap to her own. Cosima held her filched prize loosely between her ringed fingers and turned it this way and that. Palm down. Palm up. She sat up straighter and brushed a finger across Delphine’s nails. Delphine peered into her face, at the eyes behind the glasses withdrawing and turning inward. Cosima was thinking--she was always thinking--or maybe she was avoiding thinking. Delphine would not have blamed her.

"What is it?" Delphine asked, in a tone stretching for levity.

Cosima's lips thinned and then stretched into a small smile. "It's like every other time I see you, your nails are a different color. And always perfect."

Delphine flexed her fingers within Cosima's grip. "You don't like it?"

"I like it," Cosima said. "It's you. I mean, it's something I associate with you."

Delphine drew a breath, released it with a self-deprecating smile. She had never been the only one observing. She'd suspected that, maybe even known it. But a part of her, the ever-cataloging and evaluating part of her, thought, _Of course another woman would notice._ Another part of her, the part that ran ahead of reason and logic wanton and without permission, thought, _How like Cosima to notice._

It had been this way, hadn't it, since she made contact? Two, three, multiple sets of thoughts. Running parallel. Laid atop one another. Competing. Augmenting. Racing round and round in circles.

"You know," Delphine said, "when your mind goes very, very fast and you cannot stop thinking, but you need to slow down your thoughts before they get too, too . . . wild?"

"Hm," Cosima agreed wordlessly, now studiously and expressionlessly examining the lacquer.

"So you do something to distract yourself,” Delphine continued. “So you don't think about the thing you’re thinking too hard about."

The little smile returned to Cosima's face. "You paint your nails."

"Yes. It takes time. For the painting and the drying. You have to concentrate and be patient. Especially when you have to use your, um . . ." Delphine gestured with her captured left hand, swinging one of Cosima's along with hers.

"Your off hand?" Cosima supplied, finally raising her gaze again to Delphine's face.

"Yes," Delphine breathed with a grateful smile. "The, ah--” She snapped her fingers. “I remember now--the non-dominant hand."

Cosima smiled and in her eyes lurked the softness that Delphine remembered from days past. Delphine’s heart expanded overlarge in her chest, uncomfortably acute, even when Cosima ducked her head to have another look at her painted nails.

"Looks like you're pretty good at it."

"I've had a lot of practice."

"And a lot of colors," Cosima said dryly.

"I maybe also like to go shopping."

Cosima let out a little snort of laughter. Almost immediately the sound turned into an effort to clear her throat, eyebrows furrowing and eyes narrowing. Delphine, who had begun to smile at her modest success, felt instead the touch of a frown weigh down her lips. Cosima grunted again, swallowed, and took a breath that sounded _wrong._

All the questions bubbled to the forefront of Delphine’s mind: What had Cosima meant by being “sick”? What were the symptoms? How long had she been sick? Why hadn’t Delphine perceived any signs?

Notions and suspicions swam through Delphine’s thoughts. She had been alarmed when Aldous had told her that Cosima's safety was at stake, hesitant to believe his desire to protect Cosima once he discovered the scope of her investigations, but Delphine had not imagined--oh, the threats she now imagined--that danger would assault Cosima from within.

“Are you--”

“Don’t,” Cosima cut her off in a voice textured like gravel. The brunette chuffed again and pressed a hand against her chest. Delphine leaned closer, trying not to let her gaze linger on that hand or her mind to wander too far surmising what could lay behind it, but Cosima angled her body away. “Please.”

The “please,” fragile and beseeching, halted Delphine’s advance and derailed the protests and queries queuing up in her mind in neat, logical arguments. She was left with only one thing that felt appropriate to say: “I want to help.”

"I know," Cosima said, the words tumbling out of her on a sigh. She turned to fully face Delphine with an expression that suggested she did know, did believe. The sight of that conviction threatened Delphine’s lips with a cautious smile, but the weariness in Cosima's gaze checked her burgeoning excitement. “ _I know._ Just. Can we not talk about it right now? It’s been--” Cosima sucked in a shuddering breath. “--kind of a long day.”

Delphine hesitated. As a monitor, she’d always engaged in a careful dance with Cosima. Yet following well didn’t require subservience, but the receptibility to recognize and read cues. Push, pull, passivity was all a matter of knowing when.

She could push or she could wait.

But Delphine wasn’t a monitor, not really. She’d fumbled her steps attempting that dance. She was a scientist. She cultured patience in spades.

Delphine met Cosima’s eyes and nodded. Not now, not yet.

The gratitude in Cosima’s small smile rewarded her.

Cosima remembered Delphine’s hand in her lap. “Stay?” Cosima said to it. Delphine focused on the back of Cosima’s bowed head, not quite able to make out her profile. Almost as an afterthought, the brunette added, “It’s late.”

“I”m not sure that’s a good idea,” Delphine said. “That man--”

“Felix?”

“Yes. He may not appreciate finding me still here when he returns. It’s not so late that I cannot call a cab,” Delphine allowed gently.

“To this part of town?” Cosima asked, making a face, though Delphine strongly suspected that neither of them knew much about “this part of town” to evaluate it. Cosima side-eyed Delphine. “How’d you know I’d come to this city, anyway?”

Delphine froze. After a moment, she shook her head.

_Not now, not yet._

Cosima’s expression balanced on the cusp of a frown, tendrils of distrust creeping in to assay the fragile truce freshly minted between them, but surprised Delphine a second later with a genuine, rueful, shit-eating grin.

“Okay, whatever, that wasn’t fair,” conceded Cosima, hands shooing away the unknown and the withheld. “Tomorrow, then. We’ll hash it out tomorrow.”

Delphine considered it, the wall Cosima was throwing up to close off what could be her last few hours of quiet--perhaps their last few hours of trust implicit--from the long unpredictable days on the horizon, and smiled.

“Tomorrow.”

\- FIN -

**Author's Note:**

> I have looked at and worked on this fic long enough that I can no longer tell if it’s even readable or enjoyable in any way. If it is either of those things, then that’s in large part thanks to [](http://whoaheyyou.livejournal.com/profile)[**whoaheyyou**](http://whoaheyyou.livejournal.com/), adreamaloud ([tumblr](http://adrmaloud.tumblr.com/), [AO3](http://archiveofourown.org/users/adreamaloud)), and [](http://ifuritka.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://ifuritka.livejournal.com/)**ifuritka**. To all of them I extend a heartfelt thank you for their time, their encouragement, and their generosity in taking looks at drafts that were, at too many points in time, far from comprehensible. To WHY and especially Mary I say: Thank you for putting up with my constant bitching. XD
> 
> If this fic is terrible, then that’s all on me.
> 
> I hope, though, that you enjoyed. Thank you for reading!


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